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The future of Cash: Iceland vs Sweden

The poster child of a cashless society is Sweden. There are all sorts of anecdotes about beggars accepting cards, churches passing around mobile payments devices instead of collection plates, and banks no longer providing customers with cash. It is no wonder then that Sweden is the only country in the world to show a decline in banknotes and coins in circulation, the quantity of cash outstanding having fallen from 109 billion SEK in 2006 to 56 billion SEK in 2018. If you want to read more, I wrote about the Swedish miracle on my Moneyness blog here.

The death of cash scenario portended by Sweden is contradicted by another Nordic nation, Iceland. If Sweden is close to the forefront of the cashless revolution, Iceland is not only ahead of it but at the very front of the pack. No country does more point-of sale payments per capita than Iceland, clocking in at 426.9 in 2016. Whereas Sweden has an incredibly low cash-to-GDP ratio of around 1.75% , Iceland was already all the way down to an impressive 1.2% by the early 2000s! (The cash-to-GDP ratio is the number of banknotes and coins outstanding at the end of the year divided by yearly GDP. I get these numbers here).

One would probably be safe in assuming that, like Sweden, Iceland is characterized by a steady decline in banknotes and coins outstanding. But this isn't the case, as the chart shows below.